1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to business process management and, more particularly, to frameworks for business process management that facilitate adaptive monitoring and control.
2. Background Description
To succeed in today's business environment, an enterprise needs agility. Businesses must respond to changing customer needs with flexible systems and processes. Unfortunately, most enterprises are slow to respond to both the problems occurring in its organizations and the changes of requirements from customers. Static processes that cannot adapt to changing needs are a liability. Enterprises are scrutinizing the effectiveness of their business and information technology (IT) operations to identify opportunities for greater efficiencies.
Business performance management (BPM) has emerged as a critical discipline to enable enterprises to manage their business solutions in an “on-demand” fashion, that is, so that the business solution changes rapidly to accommodate changing demands in the marketplace. BPM applications are intended to promote an adaptive strategy by emphasizing the ability to monitor and control both business processes and the IT events that support these processes. In theory, by coordinating the business and IT events within an integrated framework, decision makers can quickly and efficiently align IT and human resources based on the current business climate and overall market conditions. Business executives can leverage the results of core business process execution to speed business transformation, and IT executives can leverage business views of the IT infrastructure to recommend IT-specific actions that can drive competitive advantage.
However, in practice most BPM processes and architectures are linear and rigid and are very hard to change once they have been developed and implemented. To change the requirements of these BPM systems is sometimes like building a completely new application, which costs time and money. Some enterprises attempt to increase the flexibility and agility of business processes by introducing dynamic workflows and intelligent rules. However, this kind of approach is hard to model, deploy and maintain. In the BPM domain, business analytics are commonly incorporated into business monitoring and management systems in order to understand business operations in a deeper sense. Nevertheless, most functions provided by business analytics are performed in batch mode, which compromises the ability of the management system to determine business situations and resolve exceptions in a timely fashion. It is challenging to run business analytics in a continuous manner. In general, it is extremely difficult to model, integrate and deploy monitoring and control capabilities into larger scale business solutions (e.g. supply chain management) so that the business process can be managed dynamically.
Current technologies for dynamically adapting IT systems to changes in the business environment, where the IT systems are serving an interrelated structure of business units, are inadequate in a number of particulars. There is no agreement on how monitoring and management capabilities should be defined and deployed to the customer's environment. Further, existing workflow models are process-centric, for reasons of efficiency and cost, but many business problems arising from changes in the business environment can be more easily solved using a mission-centric analysis, i.e. what an organization is obligated to do. Also, two-party service management based on service-level agreements (SLAs) cannot handle commitments crossing lines between business units in a complex organization. Finally, existing rule-based expert systems for decision support do not provide end-to-end reasoning for business commitments and capabilities.
There are several existing efforts directed toward the general problem area of adaptation to changing business conditions, but each of these efforts is deficient. An approach using the name “Ponder” provides a policy language for a distributed management system, but fails to consider modularized policies for different granularities and levels of abstraction in business process management. The Holosofx Monitor is based on time and cost only, and fails to provide a generic concept for business process management. There is no quality of service management of the wider value net within which a particular business process operates. A framework for specifying and monitoring Service Level Agreements for Web Services (WSLA) provides a web service based language to specify IT level service agreements, but there is no supporting and scalable infrastructure for handling monitoring and management capabilities.